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How cold is it in Russia?

I am getting questions like "you are from Russia, it must be cold there" quite often for obvious reasons. Despite the fact that Russia is huge and includes geographic zones from subtropics to Arctic circle I've decided to compare climates of USA and Russia.

When someone says "Russia" this probably means "Moscow", where roughly 10% of Russian population live. It doesn't make much sense to compare Moscow and let's say Florida, but because I live in Chicago and getting that question from local residents I will use Chicago weather (even so Chicago is about 10 degrees south of Moscow) to compare to Moscow.

So, here are monthly average temperatures:

Month Chicago (F) Moscow (F)
Jan 21.0 21.0
Feb 25.4 20.0
Mar 37.2 29.0
Apr 48.6 46.0
May 58.9 53.0
Jun 68.6 64.0
Jul 73.2 67.0
Aug 71.7 61.0
Sep 64.4 52.0
Oct 52.8 42.0
Nov 40.0 28.0
Dec 26.6 20.0

So it's not as bad as you might think. Moscow's winter is only 4 degrees colder than Chicago and yearly average temperature is only 7 degrees colder.

Source: www.climate-zone.com